


dead like us

by slybrunette



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-27
Updated: 2010-11-27
Packaged: 2017-10-13 10:12:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/136113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fandom!Swap with Dead Like Me. Sheldon, Penny, and the gang as reapers. Turns out the afterlife might be just as complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dead like us

“I disagree.”

If that statement, whatever it was directed at aside, was meant to faze anyone, it doesn’t. Collectively, Penny, Leonard, and Howard go back to talking. Sheldon fumes in place, his hand curled a little tighter over the bottle of water in his hand, pinky moving reflexively to smooth the masking tape that’s peeling at the corners.

It has his name on it, big block letters in permanent marker, so as to keep any mix ups from occurring. The bottle to Penny’s left, infringing ever so slightly on his space, is identical to it. But without the tape.

Raj is late. This is item number four hundred and fifteen that has him on edge, casting a furtive glance at the date book that’s approximately five inches from his dinner.

She can feel just how tense he is every time her arm or her knee brush against him as she shifts, moves for food, just generally gestures; usually there’s a perceptible change in the way he holds himself when human contact is involved. Even and especially hers. There is no room for any more tensing here but there is also no give either.

He still makes a noise in the back of his throat, one of discontent, and Leonard spares him a glance mid-sentence but that’s as far as it goes.

Sheldon checks his watch.

“I’m just saying that the special effects were revolutionary.”

Penny rolls her eyes. “And I’m just saying that the acting sucked. And I was an actress.” She uses her chopsticks to point at him, nearly losing her grip and dropping them into her food. “I would know.”

Leonard does not comment on the fact that he can count the number of acting roles Penny had on one hand. Because Leonard is not completely stupid and chopsticks could be used to potentially stab him. Dead or not, pain is still a factor.

“She was hot,” Howard interjects.

“She was animated.”

Howard shrugs, crude comment coming to his lips right before he seems to realize that he is far closer to the line of fire than Leonard is. Penny turns eyes on him and his jaw locks up.

It makes her smile, bright as the sun. Keeping in mind that the sun can also burn you if you get to close to it.

The front door opens and Raj gets out a “he – ” before it all ends in a choked squeak.

“Oh sweetie,” Penny shakes her head at him, her expression all softness and gentle amusement. It doesn’t at all resemble the Penny from two seconds ago. “You’re never going to learn are you?”

He readily agrees with that conclusion and takes a seat at Howard’s feet. They really need more chairs in here.

“Right.” Sheldon leans forward, grabbing a hold of the date book and setting it in his lap, abandoning his food in favor of sinking into his element. Or one of them. This and science.

Penny is of the opinion that it’s because he gets to exercise some form of control over them. He has never disagreed with that assumption. He’s had plenty of time to do so.

“Now we can get started.”

Howard groans. Raj looks at his food sadly, hungry and apparently not cool with anything interrupting him. Leonard eyes Penny who eyes Sheldon who eyes the date book and the post-its contained inside like it’s the Holy Grail or whatever.

There is a system, old and predictable and as familiar to Penny as her own name is. As anything else in this life ever could be. Five post-its inside that book, vibrant colors against a plain black cover and white pages.

He hands them out with a smile that is unbefitting of the task.

Pink for her, blue for Leonard, green for Howard, purple for Raj. Sheldon’s are always yellow because those are the color post-its are supposed to be, according to him.

Leonard’s the first one to pick a fight.

That’s probably because Leonard has the most easily recognizable address written on his.

“Oh come on, Sheldon, I work there.” The slip of paper hits the coffee table and Sheldon looks mildly offended.

“I am aware of that Leonard.” Penny stops paying so much attention to the inevitable exchange of unpleasantries that’s about to occur and instead focuses on the address in front of her. And the name – or the half of a name they get. “I have been present for numerous events highlighting your experiments, derivative as they may be.”

Leonard doesn’t miss a beat. They have had this conversation about what Sheldon thinks of Leonard’s work, in no uncertain terms. Often. “Yes, but I _work_ there.”

Sheldon blinks. “I fail to see the value in restating your prior argument, given that it wasn’t successful the first time. Doing the same thing twice and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, Leonard; I don’t think I have to tell you that.”

“Hey, um,” Penny belatedly nudges Sheldon with her elbow; it jars the book in his lap and he gives her a look that’s less a glare and more a non-verbal variation on the usual ‘must you keep treating me as your personal punching bag and also what could you possibly find to complain about now’. “Isn’t West Alameda where that news studio is?”

Sheldon’s doing a lot of blinking tonight. She would eye the chopsticks again but that doesn’t so much work with him. “Do you not know how to perform a Google search?”

Just for that, Penny grabs his laptop instead of bothering to use her phone. When she sits back down, Raj is whispering something rapid-fire to Howard.

“Yeah, that’s what she said.” Howard says, gets handed Raj’s post-it in return. He squints at it, vaguely confused. Then, “Did you say West Alameda as in 3000 West Alameda Avenue?”

Penny’s fingers still on the keyboard. “Yeah.”

He hands her Raj’s post-it. It matches her own. Except for the name. Hers is for R. Franks; his is A. Landis. Howard takes the laptop away from her, to complete the search, while she stares and stares and stares some more because they never have reaps in the same place. Sure, they hang out with each other when one has a reap and the other doesn’t but that’s not the same.

Howard grins fairly cheesily in her direction when he hits pay dirt.

“KNBC-TV, that’s the local news affiliate in Burbank – Sheldon, what the hell am I supposed to be doing there?”

“I hear they’re looking for a new weathergirl,” he informs her, sounding quite proud of himself. Her eyes only widen. “You were an actress. Surely you can improvise.”

Leonard chokes on his drink.

Daggers would be shooting out of her eyes, if that was at all possible. She restrains herself from throwing some item of food or drink at him to avoid the half hour long lecture it would elicit from Sheldon.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Rarely, if ever.”

She intentionally drinks out of his water bottle.

 

 

-

 

 

At night, she dreams her own death.

Fifteen years ago, she would’ve found that a far more gruesome prospect than she does now.

Some guy had brushed her ass in the parking lot, unapologetically, and he was so, so lucky that this wasn’t Nebraska and she didn’t have a weapon of some kind. A baseball bat. Whatever did the job. Her fist could’ve.

Instead she just threw an “asshole” over her shoulder, got in the car, and blasted the radio as she pulled out of the parking lot and did 55 on the road out of there.

Two streets over, steady speed, and there was a bunny in the middle of the road, a good twenty feet in front of her when she turned the corner. Just a little white bunny sitting in the middle of the road like someone’s lost pet.

She swerved.

The bunny led her down the rabbit hole.

Penny could’ve sworn that she was out for only a few seconds.

It’s just that when she woke up she was in a different place, several dozen feet away standing on a sidewalk on the other side of the street with a man next to her.

The front half of the car was scrunched up like an accordion, a steaming mess against a telephone pole, and she was glad not to be in it anymore but mostly confused as to why she wasn’t.

The bunny had hopped on down the street.

“What the fuck?”

The man grimaced at her language. He didn’t say anything and she wondered, briefly, if he had pulled her from the car. She didn’t remember getting out by herself.

He didn’t look like much.

More importantly, he didn’t look like someone who had just pulled her from a car. There wasn’t a scratch or a smear of dirt, oil, or otherwise on him. He was pristine.

There weren’t really any on her either, she realized.

“Aren’t you going to ask me if I’m okay?”

“Why wouldn’t you be?”

She frowned. “Maybe because I was just in a major car accident? I mean look at it – ” when she did, again, in an attempt to play follow the leader with this increasingly strange man, her stomach turned a little; there was no way that Joey down at the auto shop was going to fix that. “I’m going to have to get a new car. Shit.”

He laughed like no other man she’d ever seen. It was odd. Discomforting.

“What’s so funny?”

A woman ran out of the house her smashed up car just happened to be in front of, followed quickly by a man, and there was yelling and the man started pulling at the driver’s side of the door.

Penny stepped forward to say she was okay, to tell them not to bother, to ask if she could use their phone since hers and her purse (oh god, her wallet and her keys and _everything_ ) was in that car.

“I wouldn’t recommend that if I were you.”

She turned on her heel. “Why the hell not?”

“The gesture would be rather futile.”

Her fists balled at her sides. He noted this, a quick flick of his eyes.

“Yes, well. Perhaps you would benefit from some explanation.”

“You think?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t have said it otherwise.”

 

 

-

 

 

Something drops in the kitchen and it’s as good as an alarm clock for her.

Penny’s eyes snap open, finding herself face to face with bare skin. The freckle next to her thumb, along his arm, is instantly recognizable, not that she needs her memory jogged.

She is ridiculously quiet when she gets up, knows that if she disturbs Sheldon’s sleep patterns she will have to hell to pay. His alarm is set but it’s just after six and it won’t be going off for almost another hour or so.

Leonard is in the kitchen, fiddling with the coffee maker, and he gives her a sheepish smile when he sees her that means that confirms it was what she heard drop.

“Sorry,” he offers, and she shrugs, finding the apartment cold in only her camisole and a pair of shorts. His eyes don’t linger long; she killed that fantasy before he had the chance to fully formulate it in his head. And that was years ago.

“Just be glad it was me you woke up and not Sheldon.”

“Oh, I’m counting my blessings.”

She smiles. “I hope some of that’s for me.”

 

 

-

 

Somewhere in an apartment ten minutes away, Howard discovers just what’s happening at 360 N Arroyo Blvd at 5:45PM.

Senior Water Aerobics.

Or, in other words, sixty year old women in bathing suits.

Howard groans.

 

 

-

 

 

Howard Wolowitz died the day after Hanukah in 1968.

Cause of death: choking.

On his mother’s leftover brisket.

She always was going to be the death of him.

The last words he heard before everything cut to black, before he found himself outside with a strange woman he’d never seen before but certainly wouldn’t mind seeing on a more regular basis, the words he would be left with forever, were rather unfortunate.

“Howard,” his mother yelled from the kitchen, loud and grating, “you forgot to turn the oven off.”

For once, he didn’t yell back.

Only because he couldn’t.

 

 

-

 

 

“I’m going to need you to drop me off at the comic book store at precisely 7:12PM, so as to provide me my standard ten minute window to assess the situation and players pre-reap.”

Penny lets her legs hang off the arm of the chair, up and over, and Sheldon looks perturbed but relatively unsurprised by her lack of regard for the furniture. Leonard observes this from the couch, sipping at his second cup of coffee of the morning.

“Since when do you do reaps that close to dinner? I thought you had rules – only between the hours of four and six right?” Penny watches his face, watches the way he fights the urge to chew on the edge of his lower lip, caught in his own web.

His brain is still computing, still thinking up an answer that he deems appropriate and, preferably, one she can’t find loopholes in, when Leonard pipes up. “There’s another tournament tonight and he’s still hoping that he ends up being the one to reap Wil Wheaton.”

It wouldn’t take much convincing to get her to believe any of that.

Except.

“Wouldn’t you sort of know considering you’ve got a last name to go on?”

“Perhaps it’s a stage name.”

“Wouldn’t you already know if it was?” She takes great delight in the twist of his mouth, the way his brows knit together. Penny stretches her leg out and wiggles her toes until her foot brushes against his pant leg. It doesn’t elicit the rise out of him that it once did. “More importantly, wouldn’t Wikipedia know?”

In dramatic fashion, he glances down to his watch. “Don’t you need to be at work in a short while?”

“Maybe I’ve decided to work from home, like you do.” She plays it off as if she’s considering it, and Leonard laughs quietly behind the rim of his coffee cup. In reality, even if she was currently near irate that the Cheesecake Factory had decided to extend their hours to now include mornings, there was literally no chance of that happening. “We just don’t get enough quality time together.”

He’s stiff as a board and the noise he makes in the back of his throat is akin to the one he makes when she takes those speed bumps on Euclid too fast. She died in a car accident though, so maybe it’s not completely irrational.

Except for the part where they’re both already dead.

“Penny,” he starts, unease bleeding through. Sheldon may be her boyfriend but he’s still Sheldon. Sleeping in the same bed on a regular basis was pushing it for a while there. He’d kept himself relatively well isolated for more decades than she’s been alive – or dead – and for a while there every little step was a win.

Fifteen years later, the prospect of spending all their days together, twenty-four-seven, is enough to scare him shitless.

It’s enough to scare her too.

“It’s alright, Sheldon,” she rises to her feet, planting a quick kiss on his cheek that she has to stand on tiptoes for. “I’m going.”

 

 

-

 

 

Technically, Penny lives in the apartment across the hall.

And by technically, she means she keeps most of her stuff there in order to keep from disrupting Sheldon’s organizational schema. She has a drawer in his room; she doesn’t feel like pushing for closet space.

The previous owner, a transsexual named Louise, had been reaped by a friend of hers in the Natural Causes division. There wasn’t a lot of interaction between divisions – anyone who didn’t work in External Influences, according to Sheldon, had it too easy, and therefore should be shunned – but Penny never was one to follow rules. The difference between her apartment and the one Sheldon and Leonard live in is a monetary one. Namely, they actually pay for theirs – somehow, despite the fact that they don’t exist for all intents and purposes – and she’s merely a squatter.

Sheldon disagrees with that morally, despite the fact that more reapers squat than not. Penny just keeps on stealing their wifi.

This morning, she drops in to search her closet for a suitable dress for the interview. Supposed interview. They wouldn’t hire her as a weathergirl any more than she would _want_ to be a weathergirl. She’s a waitress and, sure, maybe that’s not her favorite career path ever but she knows who she is and she knows who she isn’t.

She was an actress. She is a waitress.

She was alive. Now she’s not.

It’s clean cut like that.

Not paying for her apartment leads to more spending money. That plus being around for thirty-eight years, while still looking like she’s twenty-three, allows for her to have developed a savings account that doesn’t look like someone’s idea of a sick joke. She has dresses ranging from skanky to elegant.

The one she ends up choosing is a square-necked red sheath, belted at the waist, the hem coming up just before the knee. It goes in the car, along with the extra change of clothes she’ll need in between; her Cheesecake Factory uniform goes on her body.

By the time she gets behind the wheel, she’s already two minutes late for her shift.

 

 

-

 

 

Raj is the variable he doesn’t account for.

Sheldon’s just sitting down to check his email, prepared to spend a day of relative solitude until Penny comes to retrieve him for his slightly off schedule reap, when Raj comes bursting through his front door.

To say he finds this annoying would be a severe miscalculation.

“If you’re looking for Penny, she’s not here.” He doesn’t bother turning around; as far as he’s concerned he can still get Raj in and out in under a minute and continue about his day. Maybe a minute and a half. “I believe she intended to pick you up from your apartment promptly at one.”

The sigh of relief Raj gives against the closed door is not a step in the right direction. “Dude, what am I supposed to do?”

“About?”

“Today. The post-it of bad luck and ill-tidings you gave me that will lead to me inevitably embarrassing myself in front of an entire studio that expects me to be able to talk in the presence of women.”

It all comes out in one big breath. Sheldon’s better at social situations than he used to be and so he knows enough to take one longing look at the half-finished email in front of him and then turn to face Raj.

“I highly doubt anyone expects you to talk. If all goes well you should function as nothing but window dressing. Penny should be the focal point.”

Raj frowns. “I’m not auditioning?”

“Where ever did you get that idea?” He truly can’t fathom it; it’s not as if he hands out these assignments arbitrarily. All the same, insight into the other man’s thought process isn’t exactly something he’s interested in, so he continues on, “You are merely there to serve as Penny’s companion. Perhaps acting as her agent or a rather supportive boyfriend.”

Raj’s mouth forms around a few sentences but none of them make it out as anything more than a rush of air.

“You would most likely meet more success with the latter, since one would expect an agent to be able to negotiate orally.”

There’s a near minute long stretch of time where Raj remains silent and Sheldon takes that to mean their conversation is over, despite the fact that he’s still standing in front of the door, facing him, mouth half open but no longer working around false starts.

He gets right back into the spirit of degrading the customer service department of Celco Physics with regards to their outrageous shipping charges and inability to send the correct order more than 33.3333333% of the time, and it figures that’s when Raj decides to start up again.

“You’re okay with this?”

Sheldon doesn’t bother to contain the scowl. He never bothers. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“She’s sort of your girlfriend.”

There has to be more to that statement; that single sentence, in and of itself, does not a logical argument make. He prompts, “And?”

“And – ” Raj’s eyes are wide and urgent, and his voice gets both louder and higher, “she’s your _girlfriend_.”

Why the people around him feel the need to argue in circles he’ll never know. “Mine and Penny’s relationship has nothing to do with your afternoon reap.” His email informs him that the draft has been auto-saved, along with a time stamp that tells him this conversation has now topped five minutes and is slowly starting its creep to ten. It only leaves him more agitated. “Furthermore, I am quite busy here so if you could either make your point or head on out it would be much appreciated.”

“You really have no problem with me masquerading as Penny’s boyfriend?”

And this is where _his_ voice starts to get louder. “Oh for heaven’s sake, you’re like a dog after a steak dinner. Clearly you believe me to be a far more possessive man than is entirely warranted, given the evidence to the contrary.”

“I’ve seen you with your comic books.” As an afterthought, he adds, “I’ve seen all of us with our comic books. You wouldn’t let me touch one of yours but Penny is fine?”

“Penny isn’t a comic book. Penny is a person, and an anomaly at that. Not to mention that if you _touched_ Penny in any way that she doesn’t approve of, you would probably be left wishing you had stayed dead when that bus hit you. She throws an impressive right hook, something that I can attest to as I’m sure you remember.”

Oddly enough, Raj doesn’t seem to have all that much to say that to beyond, “and you’re the only one of us with a girlfriend.”

 

 

-

 

 

Sheldon likes to point out that all of Leonard’s experiments are derivative.

Leonard’s never had much recourse for that. Because they are.

Once upon a time, and by that he means a decade or two longer ago than he’s ready to admit to, Leonard was a physicist. A competent, skilled physicist who had a little mishap with an elevator shaft and some chemicals that turned out to be explosive.

Then he was a dead physicist.

Basically, Sheldon – and it pains him to say this – has a point. Leonard copies himself, or at least works off of his old ideas. With the new technology and all the progress that’s been made he is breaking new ground so, really, he likes to term this as a continuation of his predecessor’s work.

Not that he’ll ever say that.

Even he knows how hokey that sounds.

 

 

-

 

 

“Okay, how about this one – ” she’s full of energy, bouncier than she was only half an hour ago; this is her break for the day. “What do physicists enjoy doing most at baseball games?”

Leonard looks like he’s just about ready to jump off a bridge, for all the good that would do. Howard’s straddling the line between amused and disturbed. Around them, the cafeteria at Caltech bustles.

“The wave,” she says, matter-of-factly, when they don’t answer. “Get it?” Recognition barely flickers over either of their faces. “You do get it, right?”

Howard’s half-laugh, more stilted than even Sheldon at his worst, does very little to reassure her.

“See, the problem with that joke, Penny,” Leonard starts, apparently determined to end her fun, “is that it’s a joke about sports.”

“No, it’s not. The wave – that’s science-y.” She’s pretty glad she didn’t try this one on Sheldon then. Their reactions might be lukewarm at best but she also doesn’t foresee a lecture coming on.

There’s a long pause before Leonard says, “yeah,” drawn out and not entirely meant.

“Well, what about the one with the radioactive cat?”

This time the laughter doesn’t seem quite so forced. There might even be a small smile involved. “Yeah, that one was good.”

Penny doesn’t bother to mention it was also one _she_ didn’t get. Instead, she eyes the clock, six minutes until E.T.D., and leans over to steal Leonard’s post-it. “So, any idea who M. Burney is?”

“Martin Burney works in the engineering department.” Leonard wrinkles his nose. “We don’t really talk.”

“He’s one of the cool kids, huh?” Howard snarks, a look of fake pity on his face that almost gets her to laugh. She bites her lip and crosses her legs, a hell of a lot more comfortable in worn jeans than she had been in her uniform. The dress still sits in the back of her car and she’s well aware of the way the clock ticks down to one.

“No, he’s just in a different department than I am.” The careful way he says it seems to indicate that’s only a contributing factor. She leaves it alone and any glare she sends Howard’s way ensures that he does too.

“Okay, so, how does he die?”

This seems to pique Howard’s interest. “What a wonderful question – ”

“No,” Leonard shakes his head, “we’re not taking bets on how he’s going to die.”

“Well not with money,” Howard defends, rather uselessly. Penny’s glad for that; she may be doing okay financially but that doesn’t mean she’s going to lay down fifty dollars over whether or not the guy slips on a banana peel on the way to his seat and cracks his head open on the floor.

That’s too predictable.

Three tables over, someone catches her eye before she can come up with a reply to Howard. A man smiles at her, glancing from the post-it in the middle of the table to her, and adding in a waggle of his eyebrows for good measure. Penny frowns, her gaze lingering. There’s something off about him.

“Hey Leonard,” she realizes the man things she’s checking him out and abruptly tears her eyes away, “is that another one of us?”

Both of the guys follow her gaze, making no attempt at being discreet about it. Recognition washes over Leonard’s face. “Oh, yeah, that’s just Kripke. We fight robots sometimes.” Off her wide-eyed look, her hand coming up to stifle a laugh, he adds, “He doesn’t work in our division.”

She decides not to press the robot thing. It shouldn’t surprise her, really; she’s known these guys for too long. “Well, at least that means you probably won’t be the only one doing reaps at work.”

“I will unless people start jumping off the roof. He works suicides.”

“I thought suicides were part of our division.”

At some point, when she was fairly new, Sheldon had sat her down and explained the hierarchy of reapers, as well as their divisions and subdivisions. It was one of his longer speeches, involving a whiteboard and an outline for her to take notes on (she had resisted the latter part); thankfully, it was also one that he didn’t feel like repeating all that much.

Last she checked, External Influences covered accidents, suicides, and homicides. It was a big division.

“No, they shifted suicides into their own division last month. Rates are up.” He shrugs. “It’s a recession.”

“You didn’t get the memo?” Howard asks.

She wants to ask if he’s kidding, but she doesn’t think he is. There’s probably a sign up list on some website that of course they would find because they’re geeks and she generally doesn’t get past her email, eBay, and whatever sales the dozens of ads that get sent to her inbox are advertising.

Moving on. “Well, you’re still not the only one. I’ve had to do one at work. Or…sort of at work. It was in the back, near the dumpsters.”

His look says it doesn’t count. She begs to differ and would like to see him try to juggle table five when it’s got the Bower family, complete with rowdy five year old twin boys and an impatient mother, three other tables, and a soon to be dead guy. Waitressing can be a thankless job.

“Speaking of people you work with – ” Howard pipes up, seeking a way into a conversation she is very much not having.

“Don’t even think about asking about Bernadette.” She says it without looking at him, but when she hears him open his mouth in protest – and yes, it’s hears, because she can the inhale that signals he’s about to continue – she looks right at him. “Thanks to you breaking up with her and not telling me, I ended up looking like an idiot when I asked how things were going with you two and she marched off crying. My manager chewed me out about making a scene and I’m pretty sure she thought that I was asking just to be mean.”

Penny doesn’t quite get a sorry out of him, but he manages to look sheepish enough – his head hung and no traces of that cheesy smile that had cropped up a minute ago – and so knows it’s implied. He means well. Most days.

Leonard makes an odd throat clearing sound and starts rustling things in his bag then, and she forgets all about Howard and Bernadette. “Are you okay?”

“M.B.,” he says, obviously not wanting to say the man’s name while he’s within earshot. She tries to find the newcomer, get a good look at the man who’s life will be over in just over two minutes, but the cafeteria is simply too full of unfamiliar faces. Sure, she comes here to hang out with Leonard sometimes but not with any frequency. Just whenever her shift gets switched around and their schedules happen to sync up.

He pulls out a sheet of paper, mint green with bold lettering and an image that’s got to be something he pulled up using ClipArt. Here and there, she catches a word or two, enough to realize what it says and then he’s up and not thirty feet away from them, he’s handing it off to some guy in a plaid button down with shaggy blond hair and glasses. Martin Burney.

Howard strains to hear, but it’s of no use; they’re talking too low and there are too many voices to sort through anyway. “What’s he doing?”

“Inviting him to a robot fighting competition,” she replies, dryly.

“Why wasn’t I invited?”

She’s too busy giving him a look to see the rest of the exchange, the brush of hands, and Leonard’s back at the table in no time, saying, “Well that was easy.”

Penny offers him a small smile.

Martin makes his way to a table in the back, and sits with two men and a woman, the group already deeply engaged in conversation. He takes a bite of his food. Doesn’t swallow. Can’t. She watches his hands come up to his throat. So do the boys.

“Choking?” Leonard asks, a hollowness to the question that is acquired over time. The first year is hard, the first five trying, but once you hit that ten year mark all that emotion just seems to bleed out of you until there’s nothing left but careless observation. Choking. Broken neck. Decapitation.

Death is death. It happens to everyone.

It also tends to be rather complex, in their particular line of work.

“I don’t think so,” she says, watching Martin’s friends carry on, oblivious to his distress. He panics, stumbling to his feet and greatly underestimating his proximity to the wall. What happens next takes a matter of seconds.

He hits the wall. The metal contraption holding up a rather large banner advertising for the next physics department mixer, apparently having come loose some time ago, jolts with the impact. And then it crashes to the ground, hitting Martin right in the head in the process.

They know he’s dead before someone recovers from the shock of it enough to remember to check his pulse. He’s standing right next to Leonard after all, looking on as a pool of blood paints the floor crimson.

 

 

-

 

 

They like to theorize about childhood traumas and dates gone horribly wrong in order to explain Raj’s inability to get out more than a string of strangled half-syllables around women.

But that isn’t it at all.

Raj just never could speak to women, outside of his family.

It’s like a really specific fear of strangers; only the ones with boobs.

When he went to college it was less of an issue; he spent a lot of time high, but it was the 70s, and so did a lot of people.

And then one day when he was twenty-seven, he accidentally said hello to a woman at the convenience store around the corner from his apartment, sober, and didn’t somehow manage to lose his voice before it devolved into brief but easy conversation.

Which is of course why he got so distracted with his triumph that he only gave the street before him a cursory glance before crossing it.

There was a bus.

So maybe that fear was healthy, after all.

 

 

-

 

 

“Okay, what about if I learned sign language?”

Talking to Raj in the car is an art form. You can only really do it successfully at red lights, and only in the form of yes or no questions.

For this Raj just furrows his brow.

“Right, because then _you_ would need to learn sign language too. So, scrap that.”

Penny taps her fingers against the steering wheel.

Raj responds with a sigh.

“Well, at least we’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

Except, really, that’s going to be far more uncomfortable than this car ride. Raj may be silent company but he’s good company. He’s familiar, good-natured, dare she say even friendly company.

It’s just the quiet. It grates at her.

She lives with Sheldon. He never shuts up, ever, except to sleep; silence isn’t even a reprieve to her anymore, it’s just plain odd.

“Okay, screw it.” The car’s moving again but she doesn’t really need to look at him to give instructions. “There’s a half empty bottle of vodka in the back. Have at it.”

Raj has never moved so fast.

“I guess a drunk boyfriend’s better than a mute one.”

Somehow, she’s pretty sure that he’ll prove her wrong on that one.

 

 

-

 

 

When the knock sounds, sometime after lunch, Sheldon knows who it is through simple process of elimination.

“You may enter,” he says, rather than get the door, having no desire in engaging in formalities with his counterpart. Their relationship has always been tenuous at best.

Leslie isn’t put off at all, walking right on through with the folder he anticipated in hand. She stops a foot short of the end of the couch.

“Cooper.”

“Winkle.”

She motions with the folder. “I got first pick.”

“That’s fine by me.”

“Because you have no intentions of choosing anyone?”

“Correct.”

They’ve done this so many times the conversation has gone from stilted to scripted to an almost easy banter, but a recitation all the same. They both know she won’t convince him to change his mind and they both know she won’t try that hard because of it; she’s only here because it’s her job and he’s only listening because it’s also his. Politics, all of it.

“And you know one of these days they’re just going to go over your head and do what they want regardless?”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Alright,” she doesn’t quite sigh as she sits down next to him – but not right next to him – on the couch, but there is the release of air mixed with a groan of sorts. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Leslie opens her file, scanning the page quickly without offering him a look. He doesn’t so much care.

“Okay, she’s short, she’s pretty, she’s young,” he isn’t sure whether she’s referring to the age she was when she died or how long she’s been a reaper, “and they’re transferring her out of D.C. because of _personal differences_ , which means that her and the guy in charge didn’t get along because she either stopped sleeping with him or started breaking laws and he got tired of covering for her.”

“I am both ill-equipped and unwilling to deal with either of those problems.”

“I took the guy.”

“And no doubt you will be participating in coitus with him in the near future.”

That she never bothers to correct him serves only as a confirmation to what he already assumed. Leslie’s method differed greatly from his own.

“Your group could use the estrogen,” she points out, taking note of the ratio of men to women as she always does. Though he’s never been sure of exactly when Leslie died, he knows she was a suffragist for a period of time somewhere in the 1910’s, most likely mid-to-late, and there’s a certain amount of her past life that bleeds into her current. Her counter-arguments for instance.

He doesn’t answer.

“You’re the oldest in the group; they’re just going to wait you out.” She closes the folder anyway, standing but not moving towards the door. He does not respect her methods but over time he’s learned that it’s best to respect her; they are equals, in both position and age. “And then they’ll just tear everyone else apart and send them to different parts of the country.”

The appeal relies too heavily on emotional reaction – it attempts to ‘tug at the heartstrings’, as others would say – and less on logic. But he thinks she knows that. Moreover, he thinks she’s relying on him to fill in the blanks for himself, in his quest to analyze just why it didn’t work.

She’s making too many assumptions as to his future actions.

“I can’t see how that would be any of your concern.” He replies, dismissively, and then he stops looking at her altogether, instead turning to the rest of the work he’s set aside to accomplish before Penny comes by to pick him up for his reap. Between the late start to the day, Raj’s earlier interruption, and now hers, he’s having a hard time focusing on one topic for very long.

Sheldon likes his quiet time; being around for over a century has cured him of much of his need for human interaction. It’s part of the reason he doesn’t work in an office building somewhere or with Leonard at CalTech. Being around regular humans just forces him to lie about certain aspects of his life and he’s long since learned that lying isn’t his strong suit.

He doesn’t notice when she leaves out his front door. The section on the woman from D.C. sits on his coffee table, a last ditch effort; he never notices.

 

 

 

-

 

 

“If you could just tell me a little more about your background…”

Oh, if only she could. Penny folds her hands in her lap and sits up straighter, pushes her shoulders back along with the corners of her mouth – she’s fairly sure her smile is starting to look like Sheldon’s extra creepy one, which scares her more than this interview does because there’s that thing, they say, where couples start to look like each other. Terrifying. Completely terrifying.

Predictably, that’s not the only thing terrifying going on. Turns out a drunk Raj is not, by any means, better than a mute one. She knows he’s hitting on women. She knows he’s a great guy right up until he’s had just enough alcohol in him to not only speak to women but to also throw the rest of his inhibitions out the window. Then he turns into Howard at his absolute worst.

She’s fairly sure he’s hit on at least three different women and got shot down all three times, surprise surprise, and the only reason she hasn’t pulled him aside and maybe decked him is because the woman interviewing her seems to look more and more sympathetic to her plight by the minute and way less concerned about her obvious lack of experience.

It takes her a while to connect that. Somehow. Probably because she forgets Raj is her boyfriend in this universe that they’ve concocted for the afternoon, and, from the perspective of the interviewer and pretty much everyone else present who possesses both eyes and ears, he’s also obviously plastered and hitting on women right and left. She should be completely humiliated right now if she had even a little investment in that relationship.

Which she doesn’t. But Kimberly Banks, future weathergirl, does. So, with absolutely no shame at all, Penny decides to work that angle. And work it she does. Uncomfortable shifting in her seat, downcast eyes, constant fidgeting with a blush high in her cheeks. She hopes she radiates hot embarrassment. Judging by the way the interviewer keeps to phrasing things gently, she thinks she must.

Penny’s never liked other people’s pity. But, then, she’s never really liked this job either. We all make sacrifices.

“Look,” the woman leans forward, conspiratorially, “they’re about to do sound check and set up for the live broadcast. If you’d like to come watch, maybe get better acquainted with the studio, clear your head, then we can continue this later when things…well, when things have calmed down.”

If she’s not careful, she’s fairly sure her smile will wrap around her damn head. She tries for relieved. “That would be wonderful,” she says.

 

 

 

-

 

 

Raj follows her on her little backstage tour. She raises an eyebrow in his general direction and he seems to read that _time to do our jobs_ , even through his little inebriated haze, because he trots along after her like a puppy, much to the distaste of the interviewer who’s name she only briefly glanced and definitely didn’t internalize.

She’s too busy looking for A. Landis, which she’s already figured out stands for Amelia Landis, the news anchor. She gets to reap a news anchor. One who, according to her watch, won’t be dying live on air which is a small consolation at best.

When she passes a guy on a ladder, messing with the light grid, _Franks_ clearly printed on the tag sewn into his uniform, she has to hold in a little laugh at the irony. Raj’s guy is an R. Franks but there’s no way that guy is just going to fall off of the ladder. She’s been doing this for too long; they don’t get simple deaths. That would be too easy.

Raj manages to keep it together once they get in the thick of things. Both of the anchors shake her hand, the most convenient formality ever for her line of work, but mostly she just hangs back and watches with half-feigned interest and completely feigned excitement. And the first chance she gets she cuts her eyes at Raj and nods her head in the direction of ladder guy, whose currently making his way down. Raj wastes little time; a benefit of being as drunk as he is – which is actually more so than he’s feeling because one of the neat side effects of being a reaper is that their tolerance is all out of whack compared to the rest of the population – is that he can lean on things. Or people. If he puts a hand out to steady himself and it lands on this R. Franks guy’s arm, then it lands on his arm. No harm done.

The harm starts approximately five minutes later with a barely audible creak. She’s listening for it, perhaps, or her hearing is suspiciously good, but there’s a creak that everyone else talks through and then, not a minute later, she watches the slow motion tumble of a lighting fixture as it falls from the ceiling – right onto Amelia Landis’ head. There is a crack, magnified by her microphone, and when she goes down there’s more than enough blood that follows to render the act of checking her pulse a fairly worthless endeavor. Her neck is bent an odd angle.

There is a round of gasps and Penny covers her mouth instead of covering her eyes. She’s pretty good at looking stunned by now. Franks is the first one to rush over, even while Amelia’s shell-shocked co-anchor stands a few feet back, green under his on-air makeup, and the rest of the crew figures out how to pick their jaws off of the floor or, in the case of the PA, stop the weird combination of screaming and sobbing that just seems to be escaping her throat, with absolutely no knowledge or effort on the woman’s part.

Franks runs over. And slips in the rapidly expanding pool of blood. He reels but gets his balance after taking a few steps back, only to trip over the ladder. His head goes through the plate-glass window of the office next to the stage, leftover jagged glass cutting a neat line across his throat.

Surrounded by panic, Penny exits stage left.

 

 

 

-

 

 

“This reminds me of my mother,” Howard groans as they make their way towards the pool, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. Leonard came along as they semi-willing but mostly without anything else better to do it participant. Or maybe Howard begged him to. The whole thing screams creepy and he’d rather be creepy _with_ someone than by himself.

“I know I’m going to regret this, but why?”

“Because _she_ was one of those old ladies in bathing suits.”

Leonard nods his head, an understanding ‘ah’ escaping and then they’re rounding towards the locker rooms. “So how exactly are you doing this? It’s not like they’re going to be wearing name tags and you’re not a senior.”

“Technically – ” he starts.

“Technically you’re old enough to be in a retirement home in Boca,” Leonard finishes for him, “and yet you never seem to point that out when women are involved.”

Howard shrugs. “It never seems relevant.”

An older man outpaces them, moving on past their destination and through a door at the end of the hall, never sparing them a glance. “And you’re sure it’s the water aerobics thing? The parking lot was actually pretty crowded. It could be anywhere.”

“Which is why it’s handy that D. Morris is actually Dana Morris, the instructor.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Not at all, my friend.” He accompanies it with a shit-eating grin too, and just when Leonard goes to point out that his job’s not over yet, his phone starts buzzing in his pocket. Penny’s number registers and he picks up.

“Hey.”

“Hey, could you remind Howard that we’re not doing dinner until eight cause of the comic book store.” There’s a pause and someone, probably not Penny, honks their horn. “Not that it matters to me since I think my appetite is completely gone.”

“Bad reap?”

“Literally like the set of a horror movie. I’m not really used to doubling up.”

“Is Raj going with you guys?”

“No, I dropped him off at his apartment. Raj is…toasted.”

He furrows his brow, draws out the word, “Why?”

“Long story, short drive. Anyways, have fun at the water thing.”

“Highlight of my day,” he tells her, and then they say their goodbyes and hang up. Just in time too because Howard is looking towards him questioningly and completely missing the thirty-some year old woman strolling down the hall towards them – and by extension, the entrance to the pool. Leonard nods his head as inconspicuously as he can, which turns out to be not very.

Howard still picks up on it, waiting until she gets closer before he goes for it. His spiel, awkward as it is, involves searching out places for his mother – such an original premise – who has knee problems and wanted him to look into water aerobics classes for her. The words low impact and unfortunate accident are thrown in there. It’s a role Howard plays to perfection because it’s his old life, living with his mother at twenty-seven and doing far more for her than most kids do for their parents, mostly because he was just a little bit petrified of his mother – at least that’s the conclusion Leonard’s drawn.

It’s all over in a handshake and then the woman disappears behind the doors leading to the pool, a friendly nod in Leonard’s direction as she goes.

“I think she liked me,” Howard observes, with a hint of – well, Leonard doesn’t want to think about the motivations behind Howard’s tone – in the second before he turns to face Leonard, self-satisfied smile in place.

“Yeah, well, she’s also going to die in ten minutes, so she’ll probably like you a little less then.”

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

Penny almost has an unfortunate accident with her too high heels three stairs from level ground and freedom. She’s pretty sure the shriek she gives is more than audible to Sheldon but no one rushes out the door to 4A and when she walks in – shoes in hand and feet bare, mind you – she doesn’t get so much as a look.

“You know, I could’ve been seriously injured out there.” She drops the heels on the floor, next to the coffee table, and deposits herself in his spot. His key strokes get a little sharper.

“It was your choice to wear those death traps on your feet.” A few clicks. “Also, it’s not as if you can die again. Injuries to us are, at best, temporary inconveniences.”

“Feeling the love in this room,” she says, but she’s beyond resigned to it. A twisted ankle would’ve felt like a slight twinge and then nothing and she’s yet to see a reaper break any bone in their body. She’s seen one get shot though, the wound healing right before her eyes. “You going to ask me about my reap?”

“You’re home early, so I assume it went well.”

“Well, you get points for effort at least.” She doesn’t bother to go into detail; she’s not even sure the situation warrants it. The only novelty to be found in the whole tale is that she’s never done a reap at a news station. Closest she’s gotten is backstage at a local theatre troupe’s performance of Much Ado About Nothing; there wasn’t quite so much rejoicing at the end of that particular performance, once they discovered the body behind the props department’s set up.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, putting more effort behind getting the words out of his mouth than meaning them. There’s a spreadsheet clearly in view on his monitor, the meaning of the data unknown to her but clearly painstakingly precise given the string of numbers that follow the decimal point. She’d ask but it’s just easier to let him go with it, minus any interruptions.

So she changes, switches out her dress for jeans and an old Nebraska Cornhusker’s t-shirt, the twin to her old one from her pre-reaper days, minus a few details and with a little more wear and tear. She sifts through the take out menus and decides on her dinner ahead of time. She considers laundry, vetoes it after realizing just how much there is to sort through, and almost decides on painting her nails except she can’t find the color she wants. In the end, that leaves her back on the couch, playing Tetris on her phone, and still he types.

“You know we have to leave soon?” She glances at the clock. “And not like ‘in an hour’ soon.”

“I know exactly what time it is.” He does a vague gesture that’s supposed to reference his watch; she’s not looking but she knows he does it. Instead, she’s looking at the coffee table and the sheaf of papers on it. A picture of a young woman, probably around her age, stares back at her vacantly. There’s writing in the corner, Sheldon’s name spelled out in writing completely different from his own. Blue ink. She thinks it looks like Leslie’s doing.

“Was Leslie here?” She asks, pulling the file into her lap.

Sheldon’s spine stiffens even more than normal, if that’s even possible. He stops typing. “Yes. Why?”

She turns over a page, finds some rather detailed work history of this Melanie Charles that she just didn’t need to know. Confirms that this is indeed a write up on another reaper, only the second one that she’s ever seen. “I think she left a dossier behind.”

He’s on the couch – on the middle cushion in what is decidedly not his spot which, wow, she can sit there now but only when he’s otherwise occupied – in two seconds flat. Abandons his work all together like she just said the magic word. And then he tries to snatch the papers away from her which was absolutely never going to work because, when push comes to shove, she is actually faster than him and, surprisingly, quite a lot stronger.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” She dangles the papers over the arm of the couch, out of his reach unless he plans on climbing over her. Very few things are that important. This is not going to be one of those things.

“You don’t need to look at those.”

“Well, you’re a little too late because I already did.” She presses her free hand against his chest, uses it to push him down until he’s actually sitting down completely and not in danger of lurching for them the first chance he gets. “And if you didn’t want me to see them, leaving them out in the open is not the best way to accomplish that.”

“I didn’t know they were there,” he tells her which, given his reaction, she’s willing to believe. There is nothing that Sheldon does that isn’t deliberate. “Penny, please give those to me. They’re not yours and, furthermore, aren’t relevant to you.”

“Which is why you flew over here the second I said something. You trying to replace me?” He sort of fishmouths at that, starts a few sentences that never become anything coherent, or audible for that matter, but most definitely are in the vein of ‘how the hell did you figure that out’ but, you know, in Sheldon speak. Her next words come out more like a squeal than anything else, and not a happy one. “Oh my god, I’m right?”

“It wouldn’t have been you.” He takes this opportunity, while her grip has gone lax, hands and papers falling into her lap, to finally get a hold of them. “And furthermore, I wasn’t the one attempting to do the replacing, Leslie was.”

“Why?”

“You know how most groups of our people function. There is a certain rate of regular turnover – ”

“And she wants to know why there’s no turnover with ours,” she finishes for him.

“As my counterpart, and the leader of the only other External Influences division located in the area, it’s her job. But it wasn’t her idea, I’m sure.”

It’s not exactly shocking news. Penny’s met Leslie a handful of times, almost always accidentally, and she knows who the other woman is in relation to Sheldon, knows that they’re both basically equals, although they probably wish that they weren’t. She knows that there’s a feeling of mutual dislike that’s been cut down over time with a feeling of mutual respect.

She also knows that there are people who hand down orders to both her and Sheldon. She’s never met them, never even heard their names. It’s always ‘they’ and ‘them’, vague descriptors and everything else left unsaid.  
Penny’s seen the gravelings. They make her fairly sure she doesn’t actually want to know what else this world has to offer.

“Why wasn’t it going to be me?” He fixes her with a look. She bites back a smile that’s more sad than pleased. “Okay, so, this whole thing is past tense?”

“For the time being.” Now it’s her turn to fix him with a look of her own, more questioning than his answering one. “Everything changes eventually, Penny.”

“You hate change.”

“It won’t always be up to me,” he says, quietly, looking to his knees and the floor beneath his feet. Sheldon’s never really been all that afraid of eye contact; the absence of it makes her uneasy. The meaning behind the words makes her uneasy. One of the many problems with being a reaper is it comes with a false sense of security: you don’t get sick, you don’t get injured, you can’t die. It’s easy to forget that everyone gets their lights eventually.

There’s no such thing as forever and he’s almost a hundred years old. It hits her like a brick wall that there won’t be another hundred years, maybe not even another fifty. She’s known him for as long as she’s known this life.

So maybe she’s found something that scares her more than being stuck with him twenty-four-seven, for all her days. Being _without_ him twenty-four-seven, for all her days.

Her hands on his is instinctual reaction, one of brief vulnerability that she covers up nicely by slipping the file out of his hands. They have to leave soon and she can’t do this now.

“You don’t need these?”

“No,” he replies, without a single note of hesitation.

When she walks it over to the paper shredder, she hears him give a little sigh, long and tired. It shows his years more than his face ever will.

 

 

 

-

 

 

When Sheldon was twenty-seven, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

His work made headlines in several countries, both due to the enormity of the honor and because he was its youngest recipient to date. It was 1914 and a world war was breaking out across the ocean while he shut himself inside an office in the University of Chicago, with his equations and his resources and tried to figure out what to do next now that his singular goal had been realized.

And then one ordinary afternoon, Sheldon took his lunch break at a deli down the street. It was a windy day but the temperatures were above average, even with the windchill, and he took his time on the way back.

He never heard the man yell from up above, as the wind carried his voice away, but Sheldon did happen to look up in time to see the ladder as it fell. The angle all but ensured it would fall on top of him and he realized this, watching its descent in almost slow motion. He realized this and he froze. There simply wasn’t enough time for his brain to put forth the necessary orders to tell his legs to move.

Surprisingly, and quiet unfortunately, they were able to reach his mouth. His last words, as recounted back to him by the kindly woman who would go on to help him find his way in this new and startling life, were: “Well, that’s fair.”

While there has been no one around with the knowledge to call him on it for some time now, Sheldon has never felt the need to revise that part of history. He stands by his statement.

He regrets nothing.

(Well, that’s a lie. He regrets one thing: that William Lawrence Bragg went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915, at the age of 25, taking over his place as the youngest winner. But, then, William Lawrence Bragg had to share that prize. Sheldon won his on his own.)

 

 

-

 

 

 

“Wil Wheaton?” Leonard asks, practically the minute they’re in the door. There’s food scattered across the coffee table, still more in bags on the counter, and Howard and Raj are already there. Nobody’s touched anything, in anticipation of her and Sheldon’s arrival. She admires their restraint; she’s starving.

“Sadly, no,” Sheldon says, trotting off to his room with comic books in hand.

For her part, Penny dumps her purse on the hook by the door and wastes no time pulling a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and sitting down in the armchair. “There’s always next time,” she says, loud enough that Sheldon can hear her from down the hall.

“Yes,” he replies, either missing out on her sarcasm or deciding to ignore it altogether, “there is.” When he returns, he’s got his date book in hand, post-it’s just barely visible. “Now, since everyone’s assembled -- ”

“Food first,” she says, much to the delight of at least Raj, who’s face lights up like a Christmas tree. Clearly, he’s sobered up. “Work later.”

Sheldon doesn’t appear to take too kindly to this suggestion, which she sort of counted on. He draws out the word “alright” like he has something up his sleeve. “I can see why you would wish to do so, considering tomorrow’s assignment.”

“Sheldon,” she pauses around a mouthful of spring roll, “I had to pretend I knew anything about meteorology today. For half an hour. While that wasn’t the shittiest interview of my life, it’s pretty damn close. There’s nothing you can throw at me that’s not going to pale in comparison.”

The minute that slow smile spreads across his face, she knows he’s got her beat. “Well, I’m glad you feel that way.”

A pink post-it finds its way in front of her. Gingerly, she picks it up, staring at the address for a long moment. It looks familiar. As in the very. “Wait a minute…isn’t there a Hooters on Colorado Boulevard?”

“Yes,” Sheldon says, even though Howard’s already nodding enthusiastically enough for everyone, “I believe that there is.”

Her glare would’ve frozen lesser individuals but not Sheldon. He’s busy getting his food together. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Only your patronage is required,” he continues.

“And you couldn’t have given this to Howard why?”

“I don’t make the decisions.”

“Bullshit,” she says.

But Sheldon’s already moved on. “Raj, how do you feel about visiting the local chapter of the National Organization for Women?”

“No, you don’t pick these assignments just to torture us,” Leonard says, shaking his head. “You would _never_ do that.”

“See,” Sheldon’s almost beaming when he turns to her, “Leonard believes me.”

She makes him go to Hooters with her the next day. It’s _way_ more uncomfortable for him than it is for her.

 

 

-

 

 

 _fin._


End file.
